corel draw backgrounds

I have Corel draw 4 and I want to do a graduated background from dark to light down the page with nothing else.I am having trouble even getting a blank page to start with and then how do I apply the fill settings to the background.
Thanks for any help!
djmsam

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Backgrounds in CorelDraw can only be of a solid colour, no gradients of any kind. What you cando is create a rectangle the same size as your page (say 8.5 x 11) center it with the Alignment command and fill it with the gradient you want with the gradient fill tool. You can, also, set the rectangle to "non printing" if you choose to.